Exiles From Themselves
By COLM TOIBIN
Published New York Times: December 31, 2009

In his latest collection of stories, Ha Jin explores the nature of displacement and the unease with which Chinese immigrants in the United States experience their new country. With skill and spareness, he uses the dozen stories in “A Good Fall” to dramatize lives in which hope has been crushed rather than abandoned, in which the struggle to find a place to live becomes as much a daily battle within the self as it is with society. His characters seem to be in exile not only from the China of their memories and dreams but from their very sense of who they are. Their emotional universe has become as circumscribed as their physical surroundings. Once inhabitants of a sprawling and familiar culture, they are now confined to a few rooms, a few streets.

Photo of Ha Jin by Jerry Bauer

A GOOD FALL By Ha Jin 240 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95
Although Jin is more concerned with the patterns made by small lives under new pressures, there are times when the broader picture comes to the fore. “It’s foolish to think you’re done for,” the downtrodden hero of the title story is told by a friend. “Lots of people here are illegal aliens. They live a hard life but still can manage. In a couple of years there might be an amnesty that allows them to become legal immigrants.” To characters like this, immigration to a land of opportunity proves an occasion of loss as well as gain. They are ordinary people with modest expectations, modest even in what they notice and remember and imagine. This lack of color is reflected in Jin’s quiet, careful, restrained prose — prose whose absence of flourish can, at times, make it all the more eloquent.

Paradoxically, some of the early stories seem to have been weakened by this approach. “Children as Enemies” and “In the Crossfire” deal with the stark clash between generations. Here the parents or grandparents, locked into an old Chinese mind-set in which family loyalty comes before anything else, make impossible demands on their children and grandchildren, who are desperate to become more fully American. This sort of conflict runs the danger of being too obvious and predictable, and so the stories read more like sketches or fables. No one behaves out of character; each confrontation is inevitable and schematically rendered.

The use of a simple scenario also undermines stories like “The Bane of the Internet,” in which a woman in China asks too much of her sister in the United States, who is overworked and underpaid. Similar problems beset “The Beauty,” about a jealous husband who hires a detective to follow his wife; and “The Choice,” about a student agreeing to offer private tutoring, then trying to decide whether he prefers his teenage pupil or her widowed mother.
Read the full review at NYT.